Where I Come From
In this Icelandic novel, an amnesiac pieces together a life, and a cultural history, from the tales of strangers.
JON KALMAN STEFANSSON’S 2007 novel “Heaven and Hell,” the first of an extraordinary trilogy, begins with a sea voyage worthy of Melville. A crew of cod fishermen is caught in a storm off a remote coast of Iceland. The land vanishes, snow swirls over the water. As the waves bear down on the soaked rowers, they must
Translated by Philip Roughton Biblioasis. 430 pp. Paperback, $26.95.
stop continually to punch off the ice that forms on their clothes. It’s a fitting image of both the sea’s terrifying indifference and a desperate, seemingly futile violence from within.
Elemental nature and human tragedy are equally present in Stefansson’s latest book to be translated into English, “Your Absence Is Darkness.” Set across farms and villages on the wind- and seaswept Snaefellsnes peninsula in western Iceland, the novel presents communities similarly shaped by their harsh and beautiful landscape, and by the rich history of their forebears.
The novel begins, however, with a blank canvas. The narrator awakes with amnesia inside a church, knowing neither his name nor how he arrived. He is not alone; there is a stranger in a back pew who makes him uneasy, and he flees outside, where he meets a woman amid the gravestones of the churchyard.
The woman clearly knows him; she is delighted by his presence and offers to take him to her sister, with whom, she implies, the narrator once was close. First, though, she brings him to the grave of her mother, where she tells a story of her parents’ love. It is but a premonition of the storytelling to come. When at last they reach the woman’s sister, the narrator experiences the first of many convulsive recollections that he sets down on any scrap of paper he can find.
Most of “Your Absence Is Darkness” consists of these writings, which come to the narrator in fugues, “as if I’d received a powerful electric shock that unleashed a flurry of vague thoughts and unfathomable feelings within me.” Some are prompted by the mysterious stranger from the church, a shape-shifter who reappears as a coach driver, switches clothing faster than a quick-change artist and, among other quirks, offers guidance while preparing crepes.
The characters and stories are as varied as they are vivid. There is Gudridur, a modest peasant’s wife who pens a philosophical article on the earthworm; Petur, a lovelorn priest who writes letters to the dead poet Friedrich Hölderlin; Jon, tormented by alcoholism and yet bewitched by the stars in the sky; and in the most contemporary story, the musician Eirikur, who was abandoned as a boy by his mother, and is adrift in Europe until a love affair and family obligations prompt him to return home.
EACH STORY COULD stand on its own; one of the pleasures of the novel is the slow revelation of their connections. This is a story of heritage, a topic hardly unique to Iceland, and yet it was impossible not to feel that it shares many of the same preoccupations — genealogical and topographical — with classic 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic family sagas. Indeed, I often found myself thinking of the family trees and coastal maps in my copy of “The Sagas
of Icelanders,” just as I often thought of the epic, compassionate and humorous lens that Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s only Nobel laureate in literature, turned upon the struggles of humble farmers in “Independent People,” a lodestone for any writer of rural life.
Yet such comparisons do not do justice to the complexity of Stefansson’s book, nor the uniqueness of his prose, rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton.
The structure of “Your Absence Is Darkness” is best described as a series of recursions: The stories build and break apart, yield to other stories, emerge again later, sometimes at length, sometimes in fragments, flashbacks, single words. The effect is kaleidoscopic; as the narrative turns, pieces shift, stories merge, themes dilate and contract. I fantasized about an edition printed in color, each narrative strand a hue of its own, the shuttling, shuffling syntax fractal in its effect.
Or perhaps the better comparison would be musical: a round, voices entering at different intervals, bringing elements of both melody and harmony. The text quotes itself constantly, tying “centuries and generations together into one unbroken whole,” in a way that feels fruitless to quote. A late paragraph of exquisite beauty made almost no sense when I tried to include it here because it builds on over 400 pages that must be read first.
Music also appears in more direct ways in the novel. Regular mention is made to specific songs and artists — from Icelandic classics and Édith Piaf to Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse — all compiled in a “Death’s Playlist” at the back of the book, and, I’ve since learned, in a Spotify playlist. I don’t know what kind of effect listening to it would have had while reading, but my suspicion is that Stefansson’s unique voice, his stunning imagery and his expansive, sympathetic score of human experience are all music enough.
Many artists have made use of amnesia for narrative purposes, whether it’s biographical rediscovery in Christopher Nolan’s film “Memento” or the more philosophical exploration of self in Tom McCarthy’s novel “Remainder.” From early on, however, Stefansson makes it clear that he is after something different. In linking remembering to re-creation, he uses amnesia to bring author and reader together as common travelers into the unknown. For what are we upon opening a new book if not amnesiac? We must have our new lives created for us. Either it must be explicitly explained, or we must piece together clues, must eavesdrop. We too appear in the churchyard without memory, and meet the world anew.
Author and reader are common travelers into the unknown.